This blog, Criminal HIV Transmission, a collection of published news stories, opinion, and resources about so-called 'HIV crimes', has now been incorporated into the new HIV Justice Network website, and will not be updated as of November 15th 2012.
For more information about the HIV Justice Network, please visit http://www.hivjustice.net

The arrest in Athens of 17 female sex workers living with HIV this week is
outrageous on many levels. It is not that a significant number of them
have had their right to respect for private life violated (12 had their
photographs published on a police website), nor that there is
uncertainty as to whether the women concerned knew their HIV status, nor
that the women were arrested after a screening process by the Greek
Centre for Disease Control (how voluntary was that, I wonder?), nor that
they have been charged with intentionally causing grievous bodily harm
(a charge almost impossible to prove, and on the facts arising simply
from having unprotected sex with clients – according to news reports it
is unclear whether any clients have actually been infected as a result
of sex with the women concerned). All these things are bad enough, but
what is really appalling is the way in which it is the women who have
been identified as the legitimate locus of control and the subject of
punitive state response.

It is appalling, but it is entirely to be expected. There is a long
and ignoble tradition of locating the source of STIs in women in
general, and female sex workers in particular. In the context of HIV
criminalization this tradition has reached a new peak (or, perhaps
better, a new trough). Put simply, HIV criminalization has compounded,
and added a new and frightening dimension to, the longstanding idea that
female sex workers are a source of pollution threatening the
cleanliness of men. It is not just that by identifying them as
the risk and the cause of any harm men may suffer, the men concerned
(and men in general) are able to divert attention from their own
responsibility (though this is important), it is that criminalization
has provided an opportunity, in this context, to reinforce the idea that
women are inherently dirty, that HIV is dirty, and that cleansing (what
a frightening word that is) through punishment, containment and
deportation (the women in Athens were foreign nationals) is a reasonable
and justifiable response.

Of this logic we should be very afraid. The elimination of dirt at a
political level has found expression, at its most extreme, in the
slaughter of the Jews by the Nazis, in the apartheid regime of South
Africa, in eugenic science and rules relating to miscegenation. It is
evident in any attempt by a society to maintain its ‘purity’ by imposing
border controls that require would-be immigrants to undergo tests that
filter out the sick and unhealthy.

At an individual level, the elimination or exclusion of dirt – or
rather the practices, attitudes and response mechanisms that attempt to
achieve this (prosecution, imprisonment, deportation) mirror a wider
political project in which the HIV positive body is punished,
marginalised and devalued because it represents everything that is
feared in post-modernity. The HIV positive body is a paradigm site
for repressive legal and political response because of its capacity to
reproduce itself in the body of those for whom it represents a threat to
physical and ontological security, and because that reproduction occurs
– and can only occur – through the merging of bodies via the
co-mingling of their ‘inside’. Elizabeth Grosz, an Australian feminist
theorist has put this better than anyone else when she explains that:

Body fluids attest to the permeability of the body, its necessary
dependence on an outside, its liability to collapse into this outside
(this is what death implies), to the perilous divisions between the
body’s inside and its outside. They affront a subject’s aspiration
toward autonomy and self-identity. They attest to a certain irreducible
‘dirt’ or ‘disgust’, a horror of the unknown or the unspecifiable that
permeates, lingers, and at times leaks out of the body, a testimony to
the fraudulence or impossibility of the ‘clean’ and ‘proper’. (Grosz,
1994: 193-4)

For Grosz, it is women’s bodies, their unstable and destabilizing
corporeality, that serve both to affirm men’s belief in their own
inviolability and, thus, the bounded body (i.e. male bodies) as the
normal, universal and legitimate form of subjectivity. The seminal
flows that emit from male bodies, reduced to a by-product of sexual
pleasure rather than conceived as a manifestation of immanent
materiality, and as something that is directed, linear and
non-reciprocal, enables men to sustain the fantasy of the closed body
and of the possibility of control over it. The socio-cultural and
psychological dimension of Mackinnon’s (in)famous assertion about the
power necessarily instantiated in heterosexual relations (‘Man fucks
woman: subject verb object’ (Mackinnon, 1982: 541), this fantasy is a
prerequisite for the maintenance of masculinity, and of the mastery –
over women, over nature – that masculinity enables, or which is its
prerogative.

To receive flow, or to be in position where there is a risk of flow
in the other direction, is to be identified with the feminine (whether
as woman, or as passive homosexual) and to lose the phallic advantage;
to acknowledge the essential materiality of the body, that its flows are
not merely by-products of the body but constitutive of it, is an
admission that strikes at the heart of masculinity, at the security
which is its privilege, and at the legitimacy of the hierarchised and
gendered socio-economic order upon which its privileged status depends.
Understood in these terms, it is unsurprising that it is women’s bodies
(despite the relatively low risk of female to male sexual transmission)
that are – within the discourse that frames the heterosexual HIV
epidemic– characterised as the source of infection. As Grosz explains,
this discourse is one that makes

… women, in line with the conventions and practices associated with
contraceptive procedures, the guardians of the sexual fluids of both
men and women. Men seem to refuse to believe that their body
fluids are the ‘contaminants’. It must be women who are the
contaminants. Yet, paradoxically, the distinction between a ‘clean’
woman and an ‘unclean’ one does not come from any presumption about the
inherent polluting properties of the self-enclosure of female sexuality,
as one might presume, but is a function of the quantity, and to a
lesser extent the quality, of the men she has already been with. So she
is in fact regarded as a kind of sponge or conduit of other men’s ‘dirt’. (Grosz, 1994: 197)

Given Grosz’s analysis it is hardly unsurprising that the Centre for
Disease Control in Greece had 1500 calls from concerned men once the
story about the brothels broke. Far from accepting any responsibility
they might have for having sex which carried the risk of STI and HIV
infection, it was entirely to be expected that their concern was whether
the women might have infected them, and that the legal response was to round up the women. Patriarchy is, after all, a Greek word.

The response of the Greek health Minister, Andreas Leverdos, prompted
in part by a massive rise in HIV infections in Greece in recent months
(954 new infections were reported in 2011, a 57 percent increase from
the previous year), and also – surely – by the political value in
deporting non-nationals at a time when Greece is in economic meltdown,
was to suggest criminalizing unprotected sex in brothels. He is
reported as saying,

Let’s make this a crime. It’s not all the fault of
the illegally procured woman, it’s 50 percent her fault and 50 percent
that of the client, perhaps more because he is paying the money.

On
the face of it this response suggests some recognition of shared
responsibility. However, it is a pipe-dream – I suggest – to imagine
that doing this (even if it were politically viable, which I doubt)
would have the effect of eradicating the deeply entrenched view that
female sex workers are to blame for their clients ills; nor is
criminalization of sexual behaviour that carries the risk of HIV
infection a productive or constructive answer to anything. It would
simply perpetuate the idea that punitive laws are an appropriate
response to what is properly understood as a public health issue that
should be addressed through wider awareness, education and an
affirmation of the importance of taking care of, and respecting,
ourselves and others.

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About this blog

This blog is now incorporated into new HIV Justice Network website which is intended to be a global information and advocacy hub for individuals and organisations working to end the inappropriate use of the criminal law to regulate and punish people living with HIV. There you will find the latest news and cases, searchable by date, country, and case type, plus all kinds of advocacy resources (including video). The information on the website is also classified by 25 topics, under six headings: Advocacy; Alternatives; Impact; Law Enforcement; Laws and Policies; and Science.

The new HIV Justice Network website incorporates all the posts from my blog, Criminal HIV Transmission, which I began in 2007. Little did I know at the time that it would become an important global resource, filling a much-needed gap by capturing what is happening in real time. It was only when I attended AIDS 2008 in Mexico City, and discovered how many people knew of me and my work, that I realised how useful a resource it had become for advocates, researchers, lawyers and others from all over the world.

Knowing that the blog served as an international information and advocacy hub placed enormous pressure on my time and personal resources. Until the beginning of 2012, the blog and its associated advocacy work received no funding – save the few wonderful individuals who donated via Paypal and a small grant from IPPF (thank you!). So I’m very grateful to The Monument Trust for its generous support which has allowed me to sustain, develop and expand the blog into the HIV Justice Network. I’d also like to thank Kieran McCann and Thomas Paterson from NAM, who designed and developed the site, as well as NAM’s Executive Director, Caspar Thompson, for his support and guidance.

HIV and the Criminal Law

This international resource, HIV and the Criminal Law, which I wrote and edited for NAM, is available as an A5 book and at www.aidsmap.com/law. To order your copy visit www.aidsmap.com/law, or contact NAM at +44 (0)20 7840 0050, email: info@nam.org.uk If you are based in a low or lower middle income country, as defined by the World Bank, and would like a free copy of this book please contact NAM.

Why Criminalisation Matters

Click on the image above to listen to Sean Strub, Catherine Hanssens, Vanessa Johnson and I discuss why HIV criminalisation in the US is a major issue for public health and human rights. The panel took place in February 2011 as part of the eQuality Thinking virtual convention.

Funders Concerned About AIDS

I delivered the keynote address, 'Combating HIV Criminalization at Home & Abroad', to the annual gathering of US-based HIV funders in Washington DC in December 2010. Video of my presentation is now available. Visit the FCAA website to watch it online.

Criminalisation of HIV Exposure and Transmission: Global Extent, Impact and The Way Forward

This meeting by and for advocates against the criminalisation of HIV nondisclosure, exposure and non-intentional transmission was held on July 18th 2010 prior to AIDS2010 in Vienna and co-organised by the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, the Global Network of People Living with HIV and NAM.

This poster presented to the XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna in July 2010, highlights how the US criminal justice system routinely breaches international human rights standards [click on the image to download an interactive pdf file]